


Better

by gnomesb4trolls



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Internalized Homophobia, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 14:03:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13683174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnomesb4trolls/pseuds/gnomesb4trolls
Summary: So apparently writing sad Narnia fic is how I mark major Christian holidays now? Also, Susan and Edmund having each other's backs is my jam.





	Better

Edmund was the only one who came home for Easter that year.

When Susan asked him to go for a walk he looked surprised, as if he hadn’t expected her to want to talk to him. He’d shot up in the months since she’d seen him last, and she realized, standing in the doorway of the same bedroom he’d left to be evacuated from London all of those years ago, that he was taller than her now.

She tried to remember if this had also happened last time they’d grown up, but the years blurred together these days.

They went to the park across the street from their parents’ house, a drearily regular square of green surrounded by all of the drearily regular gray houses. It was raw and damp, too early in spring for any real softening in the air, but too late for any of the stillness of deep winter. All of the benches were wet, so they just kept walking, silence stretching between them. As soon as they turned a corner that took them out of sight of the windows of the house, Edmund pulled a cigarette and lighter out of his pocket.

“What?” He met her curious look with a defiant one. “They help me calm down.”

Susan shrugged. “You don’t have to explain to me,” she said. “I’m not Mum. Or Aunt Alberta.”

“You sure looked like her, just now,” Edmund said.

She was about to retort when he flashed her just a corner of his most charming grin, the one that he only used to use on ambassadors when they really needed a negotiation to go well, and her breath caught because he was there still, the old Edmund, underneath this tall, nervous stranger.

The cigarette was a cover, she could see that now: he was trying to disguise the way his hands weren’t quite steady, the way he held his shoulders as if braced against something. She wondered if his secret was the same as hers.

“Where’d Lu go, this holiday?” he asked, blowing smoke into the frigid air.

“To her friend Gwen’s, in Scotland,” Susan said. “And Peter’s too busy with university to come home, of course.” She hoped she didn’t sound as bitter as she felt. She didn’t blame Lucy for her absence, and she shouldn’t blame Peter either. It wasn’t his fault that it hadn’t occurred to him that she might need him now, that she might need help being reminded of who she was supposed to be.

“Probably for the best,” Edmund said, leaning his shoulder against the nearest tree trunk. “I’d just drag everyone down.”

“Ed.” In spite of the cigarette, he looked younger just then, still her moody baby brother, and she would have hugged him if she thought he’d let her.

He turned his face away, squinting through the screen of bare trees as if he could see something besides more ordinary London houses on the other side. “Do you ever feel like you were better, there?”

Susan went still. The last time they’d all four been together, they hadn’t talked about Narnia at all, which she had told herself at the time was for the best. “Yes,” she said, before she had time to ask herself if she should lie to try to make him feel better, “all of the time.”

It was just like Edmund to ask the same question she’d been asking herself, during all of the long months since she’d left school, since Alice had gone on to the rest of her life without her. It had been so, so clear, when they’d said goodbye, that Alice had only ever thought of what they had as a schoolgirl lark, something she would look back on fondly in the years to come, and Susan had felt herself shatter all over again, even though she shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d been trying to piece herself back together ever since, to understand how this could have happened in the first place. _Was I like this before, in Narnia?_

“Su? Are you all right?”

Susan realized that she had put her hand on the trunk of one of the spindly, dripping trees, an old habit from another life that she’d never quite broken. If this tree had a spirit, though, she couldn’t feel it. “I’m fine. It’s just, sometimes I feel like I’m not growing up the same way as before. And that maybe this version isn’t quite right.”

Edmund nodded. He’d finished his cigarette and he looked even more vulnerable without it. “It was different, before. I knew what I was doing. Here, I just feel…”

_Adrift. Moorless._ Susan didn’t say the words out loud, but they met each other’s eyes and she knew that he understood. She felt a sudden, fierce stab of longing for Peter and Lucy: both of them were steadier, and they needed some of that ballast now.

“Maybe that’s the point,” Edmund said, shifting so that he was leaning his whole back against the tree trunk. “Maybe we’re supposed to figure it out ourselves, this time around.”

“It wasn’t exactly easy, last time.” She knew what Edmund meant, though. Last time, they’d had a prophecy and a job to do, and above all, they’d had each other. Maybe that was why she couldn’t answer the question that most haunted her: because she hadn’t needed anyone else then, because the four of them had created something together and that had been enough.

For a second she just looked at Edmund, the tight hunch of his shoulders, his empty hands, and she felt her heart crack because he was so _good_ , because she’d spent years watching him do the impossible with nothing but a smile and the force of his convictions and he was still that person, even if he couldn’t see it.

She did the only thing she knew how to do: she moved until she was right in front of him, and took both of his hands, gripping tight.

“Edmund,” she said, waiting until he looked at her, “You’re not _worse_.”

He shook his head, not as if he was trying to argue but as if he couldn’t quite believe her, but he didn’t pull his hands away.

 

Later, after dinner, he came to her room and curled up in her window seat, staring into the blackness pressing up against the glass while she wrote a letter at her desk. There was an alcove in one of the hallways of Cair Paravel where he used to do that; she’d met him there more than once, in those early days when it had been hard to sleep. He’d been smaller, then, but the way he curled his arms around his knees was exactly the same.

The letter that Susan was trying to write was to Alice. She’d promised that she would, after all; she just didn’t know how to pretend that what was between them was something different than what she remembered, even if it was true, now. All of her truths had changed so many times that she should have been used to it, but she never was.

“You should get out of this house.”

“What?” She didn’t know when Edmund had started watching her; she felt exposed, even though he couldn’t possibly know why this letter was taking her so long.

He turned on the window seat so that he was facing her. “You could leave,” he said. “Find a job. Have your own life.”

“Mum and dad don’t want me to. They don’t believe in girls doing that.”

“I know,” he said. “But what can they do?”

They looked at each other, and for the space of a breath nothing had changed and it was like it had always been, the two of them facing each other across a problem that would take all of their combined wits to solve. She missed that, the feeling that they were in everything together. They weren’t, though, not anymore: in a few days he would go back to school and she would still be here, going to the parties her parents suggested and trying to write the same letter over and over.

“I suppose I could,” she said, as if saying it would make her believe it. With Edmund looking at her like that, like he saw the person he had built a kingdom with, she almost did.


End file.
